A Secret Gift Read online

  Sam’s father, Jacob, was distant and demanding, steeped in faith and the exigencies of feeding his family. A tyrannical figure, he was obeyed but not loved. The hardships of Romania, the trek across Europe, the inescapable sweatshop in their home, all made his father’s emotional distance that much harder to bear. Only Sam, the oldest son, had the courage to stand up to him. There is a story passed down that when Sam was a young boy he was sent to pick cherries, and he fell from a tree, broke his leg, and limped home. There he received neither sympathy nor help. The hardness to which Sam was exposed in his youth made him appreciate compassion all the more. He saw what his father was. He saw emotional wreckage all around him and he wanted no part of it. He had escaped the cruelty of the state, and was no less determined to put the callousness of his home life behind him.

  Sam was unwilling to fritter away his days in an attic rolling tobacco leaves. He began to eye the door and plot his getaway. In Pittsburgh, he found work as a peddler, then a salesman, and finally a window dresser in a millinery shop. Along the way he taught himself English, suppressed his accent, and learned to dress in the fashion of the day and carry himself with pride. He became a student of advertising, merchandising, and window dressing. He implicitly understood how dependent the world’s judgment was upon the visual. His new life could be affected as simply as a costume change. Like so many immigrants, he had something to prove—to the world, but also to himself. The limits and doubts and foreshortened horizons with which he had grown up were still there to be tested. His was an ambition fueled less by what he longed to acquire than by what he hoped to shed.

  In 1920, nearly two decades after arriving in America, his father, fifty-eight-year-old Jacob, and his sons David, Isador, and Moses were all still living at 51 Rowley Street, still answering to the name Finkelstein, and still rolling stogies. And there the sons might well have spent their entire lives if Sam hadn’t rescued them with the promise of a new job, a new name, and a new life in Canton, Ohio. It was a kind of Pittsburgh in miniature, a gritty midwestern steel town of diverse immigrants and ample opportunity for the willing.

  Rarely did Sam speak of his years in Pittsburgh. There are no pictures of him from that period, and none of his father. “Sam Finkelstein” virtually vanished in 1918, when he first arrived in Canton. In his place was Sam Stone—eager, tireless, and, by his own account, native-born. To thoroughly reinvent himself he had to leave Pittsburgh and find a place where no one knew him or his family. He had traveled thousands of miles from Romania to Pittsburgh, and yet much of the grimness of his life had followed him every step of the way. In Canton he could truly begin again.

  But the earlier years, the years of rolling cigars, had left their mark. A whiff of tobacco sickened him. Long before it was fashionable, he supported antismoking campaigns, and there was nothing he reviled more than a cigar. (That his future father-in-law would be a cigar salesman did not endear him to Sam.)

  The education that was denied him also left its mark. He never learned to write in cursive. His siblings too suffered from a lack of schooling. As a young woman, his sister Gussie could neither read nor write. In later years, her daughter, Shirley, then six or seven, would return from school and teach her the alphabet and how to read. One of Gussie’s proudest moments was being able to sign her own name as she opened up a meager bank account. On Saturdays—Shabbat, the seventh day of the Jewish week and the day of rest—Gussie would take her daughter to the homes of Jewish immigrants newly arrived in Pittsburgh and have her teach them as well. Often they would offer little Shirley food as payment, but she had been instructed in advance to decline, saying she was not hungry even if she was. If she forgot, her mother would remind her with a pinch. She knew to politely decline even an offer of a few pennies.

  It was a way for a proud mother to show off her daughter, the American. But it was also a mitzvah, a Hebrew word meaning “commandment,” but one that has come to mean an act of human kindness—not something to be tainted by money. The truest and highest form of giving is that in which the giver expected and got nothing in return. It was a commandment that was ingrained in each of the children and consummated in Sam’s reaching out to those in need that Christmas of 1933.

  Sooner Starve

  Sam and many of his generation entered the Depression clinging to a stubborn individualism that bordered on social Darwinism. They had made it, so others could too. Those who did not share their good fortune had their own network to fall back on. It was called family, the church, or, at its most extended reach, the community. But one in distress did not generally look to government. In 1933, government was still seen as distant and removed, and, given the experience of many immigrants in the Old World, so much the better.

  In 1933, the notion of individual responsibility and the role of the state were both being sorely tested. Across the sea, the Soviet Union was creating a society that, as hard as times were here, was seen by many as toxic to individualism. That nation was mired in its own Hard Times, one that made America’s pale by comparison. By some estimates, more than seven million people starved to death there between 1932 and 1933.

  Still, American confidence had been shaken, and its revulsion to Marxism was not universal. Had the New Deal not struck some middle ground between laissez-faire capitalism and unfettered socialism, had it not moved to resuscitate the nation, the outcome might have been different. There reached a point here where misery was so widespread and opportunities so few that many came to believe individual action alone could not address the catastrophe they faced. Resistance to government aid would soften, and expectations of the role it should play underwent profound change, for better or worse. (That debate continues.)

  It is difficult for Americans today to grasp the stigma that attached to government “handouts” in 1933. By February 2010, thirty-eight million Americans—one in eight—were on food stamps. But in those early years of the Depression, the people of Canton, and those of the nation, would have recoiled at the idea of such a program. The seismic shift in public attitudes toward welfare and public relief programs, indeed toward government as a whole, that followed the Hard Times was as fundamental and far-reaching as any in our history. But in 1933, antagonism to public aid was still deeply ingrained. That fierce individualism can be heard in many of the letters to B. Virdot. Among these was the one written by Joseph P. Rogers, a once successful insurance agent who for six months of the previous year could not say whether he would be able to feed himself, his wife, and his daughters, Carolyn and Eleanor. “I cannot go to the Welfare for help,” he wrote. “I can’t even express myself in writing this letter. It hurts. Something within me rebels.”

  Merely being identified as one in want was more than many could bear. In one case in particular, the writer’s anguish in reaching out to B. Virdot was so intense and her fear of being identified so deep that even three-quarters of a century later I cannot bring myself to identify her by anything more than her first name—Mrs. Bessie A. She wrote:I am a poor woman with a sick girl trying to work and help keep home for a crippled sister and myself.

  We are one of the thousands of unfortunate familys who had seen better days, now to Proud to ask charity . . . This is one of the poorest xmases I ever had.

  If I thought this would be printed in the papers I would rather die of hunger first as I haven’t been a begger all ways. Hope for better days for my family and the others like us. . . .

  The woman who wrote those words was a fifty-five-year-old mother and former phone operator for Western Union. She had emigrated from Ireland in 1880 hoping for “better days,” words that surely would have resonated with the immigrant in Sam Stone. But instead, she found only more of the same. Bessie A.’s words to B. Virdot, particularly her revulsion to accepting charity, are repeated almost verbatim in other letters. Both those born into poverty and those born into privilege viewed the dole with equal distaste. “I believe Mr. Zerby would starve before he would ask for help,” wrote Catherine Zerby of her husband, Geor
ge. The daughter of esteemed photographer Jacob S. Wissler, she was not accustomed to such hardship. “We cannot afford the newspaper,” her letter began, written on personal stationery with a gold embossed letter Z.

  For many today it is difficult to understand the stigma attached to going on the dole or accepting charity. For men like my grandfather, who took such pride in escaping poverty and in providing for himself and his family, charity represented the final act of capitulation. It was not seen as a stop-gap measure to tide one over, but the repudiation of a lifetime rooted in self-reliance. The shame of poverty was tolerable—so many were in distress that Christmas of 1933—but the loss of face that came of publicly applying for relief, of claiming that one’s needs were equal to or superior to another’s, of enduring the gauntlet of probing questions, of surrendering one’s dignity and privacy, for many was too much to ask. They had already been stripped of so much. Self-respect was all they had left.

  In her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, Stella Waidman wrote that her husband, Albert, an out-of-work toolmaker, had had surgery and that to pay for the doctors, nurses, and hospital bills, they had sold their home, which was almost paid for. “We could have kept that home if we would have accepted charity,” she wrote, “but we thought it best for Mr. Waidman’s name and for the childrens sake to pay off our bills and sacrifice our home, and build up again.” Her aversion to charity surfaced again near the end of her letter when she wrote, “Please do not send us anything out of pity . . .” The B. Virdot check arrived days later.

  American notions of accepting charity were riddled with contradictions. Giving was the Christian thing to do, contributing alms in church and recognizing that we are our brother’s keeper. To give to charity was ennobling, but to accept it was degrading. That was, at least in part, why Sam Stone insisted on his own anonymity and pledged confidentiality to those who wrote to him. They were the only terms under which people, as proud as they were destitute, would come forward. They were the only terms under which Sam himself might have reached out to others.

  Many resisted the dole with a mix of defiance and faith. Among those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot was Roy Rhoads. His December 18, 1933, letter begins:I saw your kind letter and offer to help the unfortunate to at least one day of happiness. I am like many others. You will not find my name on the Family Services I have been fighting it out and trusting in the Lord and believe me Brother he helps. My name is Roy Rhoads—1124 Clev. Ave. N.W. am 58 years old, wife and our Boy. He has been out of work over 2 years and I worked at Hoover Co. 11 years was laid off 3 years ago and have Battled ever since. I get out and sell razor blades and my wife cares for tourists and people looking for a room and does washing for others. We are back with our rent 4 or 5 months.

  I hate to admit all this as I worked all my life and would work at any honest work if I could get it. I worked a few days for the city and cleaned snow from people’s sidewalks. That is all the work I have found. I signed up at Y.M.C.A. last Aug. but have never been called. Not for my sake but for the wife and brighten one home, if you could help it would be appreciated.

  YOURS RES.

  ROY RHOADS

  1124 CLEV. AVE. N.W.

  CANTON, OHIO

  Roy Rhoads and his wife, Margaret, did indeed survive the Depression. In the years after, as the economy improved, Rhoads found work at the Hoover Company and later Timken Roller Bearing. The years of trauma and desperation behind him, he again learned to enjoy life and gained a reputation as a master of the French horn, an instrument he played in several area groups, including the 135th Field Artillery Band. Hard work and frugality eventually allowed him to retire. His granddaughter Kathleen remembers him as a quiet man with wire-rimmed glasses, sitting in a rocking chair, smoking his pipe. He died in 1950 at age seventy-three.

  Dandelions and Pencils

  What Roy Rhoads and so many others faced in the depths of the Depression was an utter absence of jobs. No matter how willing one was to work, no matter how humble the wages one would accept, there was still often no work to be found. The Depression pitted one unthinkable against another—the stigma of the handout against the sight of one’s loved ones going to bed hungry and cold. It forced many to the edge between personal honor and false pride. Howard Sommers’s letter to B. Virdot described the desperate straits that many faced but also the determination not to seek charity. On December 18, 1933, he wrote:Dear Friend, B. Virdot

  As I picked up the evening paper I saw your most generous offer to worthy people. I count myself & my wife most worthy as for the last four years I have only had a few days work here and there. But I will go ahead and state the jobs my wife & I have had to do before we would ask for Charity. Picking berries in season and selling them as late as 12 oclock at night, picking cherries on the share and selling our share, My wife had to climb to the tops of the highest trees as I am lame and cannot climb. We have started as early as February to gather dandelions to sell and sold them till May or till people would not buy them any longer as they to tough to eat. Our winter time job is gathering Sassafras which is a lot of hard work and not much money in it. The last 6 or 8 months I have been selling Liquid Solder, Pills & Styrtie pencils in and about Canton for about 10 miles around at nearby towns but I found that selling house to house is a hard job as scarce as money was. As far as clothes is concerned I have had to buy a few things for myself as I had to meet the public, but my wife has not had a coat in 7 yrs. and her last pair of shoes were bought in 1929. The coat is not fit to wear. We have always kept an old car which was the only way we had to get our wood & coal and take us to country to pick our berries & etc.

  Well I think this is enough said, but I could sit here and write for hours, but 3 pages is enough.

  After you have read it over and you are the gudge and you don’t feel that we are worthy of your donation, secretly as you promised then, please destroy this letter so no one will know but you & I.

  So Good-bye & Good Luck, and we are living in hopes that good luck comes our way.

  FROM MR. & MRS. HOWARD

  SOMMERS.

  Sommers’s reference to gathering cherries and being lame would likely have triggered Sam’s own childhood memory of being sent to pick cherries and breaking his leg. Howard E. Sommers was the son of Franklin and Phebe Sommers, farmers who worked the land outside Canton in Jackson Township. Despite the weary tone of the letter, Howard Sommers was only twenty-eight when he wrote it. Almost nothing is known of the turns the Sommerses’ lives took after writing to Mr. B. Virdot. Howard Sommers died at fifty-seven; his wife, Mary, died before him. His July 9, 1962, obituary in the Canton Repository notes only that he worked as a handyman, that he had been under a doctor’s care for a heart condition, and that neighbors who had not seen him for days discovered his body in his home. No survivors were listed. It would appear that his letter to B. Virdot is all that survived him.

  Shame

  Over time, the Depression had a slow, grinding effect on the spirit. On one level, some of those who wrote to Mr.

  B. Virdot knew not to take their hardships personally, that so many around them were enduring much the same, but the universality of their suffering did not keep their babies warm, pay for medicine, or save them from eviction. Husbands often took to the road in search of jobs and did not return for months or even years. Before the Depression, John Boyer had had his own service station, and he, his wife, Margaret, and five children lived in a home that he owned. The Depression undid all that. When Margaret wrote to B. Virdot in 1933, John Boyer was in Florida looking for work. The family was left behind, having been forced to give up their home. Circumstances were bleak. “The conditions under which my children are now living,” she wrote, “would seem unbearable.”

  Four years into the Depression, the sense of personal failure stole into their lives. Shame and self-reproach took many forms—alcoholism, spousal abuse, depression. The children of Roy Teis remembered their father walking in back alleys and going blocks out of his way to reach their hom
e, all in an effort to avoid a neighbor’s glance or questions. His wife called it his “shame-face.” But it was being at home, seeing the suffering of little ones, that was often the hardest part. The letters to B. Virdot are filled with such anguish.

  One of those to write B. Virdot was thirty-three-year-old Hilda Criswell, a mother of four and wife of Reuben Criswell, an out-of-work painter. The daughter of Danish immigrants, she had married at sixteen. She knew how to make do on little, but her resourcefulness had its limits. She had always made her children’s clothes, but now there was no more material. Her twin ten-year-old daughters, Virginia and Vivian, had worn clear through their shoes. “I am ashamed to face my children anymore,” she wrote. Sam would have had a soft spot for her. She shared his mother’s name, Hilda, and one of her daughters shared his firstborn daughter’s, Virginia. And any letter that spoke of the need for shoes—and there were many—would have rekindled personal memories.

  Until then, it seemed to some that poverty afflicted only a particular class—those born into hardship . . . It was a kind of negative inheritance, not something that randomly befell the frugal and hardworking. But Mrs. Bessie King, a forty-three-year-old widow and mother of a ten-year-old boy, was caught in the same vortex of poverty that held those she had always viewed as apart from if not below her. Suddenly she found herself applying for assistance. “Oh how it goes against the grain.” she wrote, “to have to go up and sit among the foreign element, and Negroes from 1 to 2 hours, sit there and wait for your turn just like a barber shop . . .”